Python Tutorial

To connect to mysql with python, you will need the MySQLdb module for python. Get this module at sourceforge: MySQLdb Module

Install the module like this:

   $ tar -xzvf MySQL-python-*.tar.gz
   $ cd MySQL-python-*
   $ python setup.py build
   $ python setup.py install

Now when you are in the python terminal and write:

   import MySQLdb

you should get no errors.

---

Now to get some data out of a MySQL database...

   #!/usr/bin/python
   
   import MySQLdb
   
   # connect
   db = MySQLdb.connect(host="localhost", user="myuser", passwd="mypass", db="mydatabase")
   
   # Since we would like to return a dictionary instead of a list we use the
   # DictCursor instead of db.createCursor() which would give us a numeric index only
   cursor = MySQLdb.cursors.DictCursor(db)
   
   # execute SQL statement
   cursor.execute("SELECT * FROM my_table")
   
   # get the results
   result = cursor.fetchallDict()
   
   # iterate over the results
   for record in result:
       print record['my_col']

---

That should get you started with Python and MySQL!